Ratio, proportion and percentages

From politics to cookery, ratios, proportions and percentages are part of everyday life...

From politics to cookery, ratios, proportions and percentages are part of everyday life. This free course, Ratio, proportion and percentages, is designed to help you become more familiar with how figures can be manipulated, then you can check whether that discount really is as big as they claim!

After studying this course you should be able to:

work with simple ratios

convert between fractions, decimals and percentages

explain the meaning of ratio, proportion and percentage

find percentages of different quantities

calculate percentage increases and decreases

calculate average speeds in given units and find speeds, distances and times for travel at constant speed

Study this free course

Enrol to access the full course, get recognition for the skills you learn and track your progress. Make your learning visible!

Ratio, proportion and percentages

Introduction

The topics in this free course, Ratio, proportion and percentages, are concerned with dividing something into parts. For example, if there are 200 people living in a small village, and 50 of these are children, this could be expressed as a percentage:

25% of the village population are children;

or as a ratio:

one in every four people is a child or there is 1 child for every three adults;

or a proportion:

the proportion of children in the village population is a quarter.

Enrol to get a record of achievement

By enrolling on this course and setting up a free Open University account you can track your progress in My OpenLearn. When you’ve finished you can print off the free activity record to demonstrate your learning.

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Copyright & revisions

Publication details

Originally published: Friday, 1st August 2008

Last updated on: Wednesday, 29th April 2015

Copyright information

Creative-Commons: The Open University is proud to release this free course under a Creative Commons licence. However, any third-party materials featured within it are used with permission and are not ours to give away. These materials are not subject to the Creative Commons licence. See terms and conditions. Full details can be found in the Acknowledgements section.

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